In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental quantitative study was to investigate whether online interactive simulations would provide a positive improvement in learners' ability to apply critical thinking skills in a dangerous work environment. The course in which an improvement in critical thinking skills was the target outcome was a course which…

This paper examines the nature of academic classroom tasks middle school teachers are designing and using that integrate one-to-one technological devices/computers: technology integration (substitution/augmentation/modification/redefinition-SAMR); 21st century skill (4Cs) integration; task complexity (DOK); and student work aspects (work product,…

Why do people enjoy jigsaw puzzles, which--challenging and time-consuming as they are--might be considered more like work than play? The author investigates the motivations, preferences, and satisfactions of individuals working on jigsaw puzzles, and she explores how these elements of play relate to the procedures and strategies puzzlers use to…

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies on programming…

Using more complex items than those commonly employed within the information-processing approach, but still easier than those used in intelligence tests, this study analyzed how the association between processing speed and accuracy level changes as the difficulty of the items increases. The study involved measuring cognitive ability using Raven's…

In the field of second and foreign language learning, how various task characteristics affect language learning has been the focus of many recent studies. Much of this research examined the relationship between task characteristics and task performance without fully taking into account learner related variables. The present study aimed to assess…

Assessment engineering is a new way to design and implement scalable, sustainable and ideally lower-cost solutions to the complexities of designing and developing tests. It represents a merger of sorts between cognitive task modeling and engineering design principles--a merger that requires some new thinking about the nature of score scales, item…

This study compares the effect of different kinds of distractors on the level of difficulty of multiple-choice (MC) vocabulary tests in sentential contexts. This type of test is widely used in practical testing but it has received little attention so far. Furthermore, although distractors, which represent the unique characteristics of MC tests,…

The impact of particular types of context effects on actual scores is less understood although there has been some research carried out regarding certain types of context effects under the nonequivalent anchor test (NEAT) design. In addition, the issue of the impact of item context effects on scores has not been investigated extensively when item…

This research looked at the process of the diffusion of an innovation in the context of smartphones with American senior citizens. The subject of diffusion, or spread of a technology, is a rich and varied topic with more than 60 years of research. Much of this diffusion research does not go beyond the study of the original acceptance of a new…

The purpose of this body of work was to gain a clearer understanding of the potential cognitive factors that may contribute to Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This study attempted to simulate a performance profile of SLI in typically developing children within a grammaticality judgment task, featuring structures historically difficult (third…

The study investigated the effectiveness of causal words embedded in Chinese texts to explicitly indicate causal links between the described events. Primary school students with different levels of reading expertise participated in the experiment that compared an embedded casual-words format with the original no-causal-words format. An interaction…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

This study aimed to explore teachers' and students' perception of pronunciation teaching in Indonesian EFL classrooms, particularly on (1) the difficulty of English pronunciation, (2) the reasons for the difficulty, (3) the inclusion of pronunciation in EFL classrooms, (4) the goal of pronunciation teaching, (5) priorities in pronunciation…